


Untitled

by Mercy



Category: Mighty Boosh (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mental Institution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercy/pseuds/Mercy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for booshbattle-- prompt was mental institution. Extremely short.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled

**Author's Note:**

> Original booshbattle post [here.](http://community.livejournal.com/booshbattle/4322.html)

Howard hates coming here. It gives him an itch under his skin that builds up in the days before, waiting for the phone call where they say today is a good day, meaning as good as it's going to get. This time is worse than most, because for three months now it's been 'sorry, maybe next weekend.' But this morning the words came crackling down the line, 'lucid' and 'coherent' and it's a mad dash to buy flowers and gather the overdue birthday present that's been sitting hopefully on a closet shelf, an urgent summons because who knows how long it'll last. Once they got all the way here only to be greeted with apologetic utterings of 'episode' and 'sedated' and had to go straight back to London after a meeting with the doctors full of too many sorry silences.

But it's gone all right today and they're here, even though Howard hates it. Hates the hard chairs and the droning television no one's watching and the stacks of tattered board games, Monopoly hats and Parcheesi men replaced with plastic disks too big to swallow. He hates the art room most of all, walls plastered with psychotic scenes in non-toxic paint, glimpses into places he doesn't ever want to go and made all the more disturbing by the fact that he recognises some of them.

It's always the art room they visit in, though. 'We like to allow our residents the freedom to be where they're most comfortable,' they say like human pamphlets. Always 'residents,' never 'patients' or 'prisoners,' which would be far more accurate.

The 'resident' they've come to see is stood at an easel wearing a soft smile and a lot of paint, a wrong-coloured moustachioed Hoover taking non-toxic shape on the canvas.

Howard hates it. It makes him feel as though he might be mad too, or having 'an episode' or 'a bad day' as they say. It feels like backward parent-teacher day at school. He hates it, but he does it for Vince, because he'd do anything for Vince, and Vince needs him here.

Because it's Howard's hand that Vince grips when he sits down and smiles a hollow smile and says, "Alright, Mum?"


End file.
